A few years back I remember pondering how the web was killing tabloidese (with inspiration from a piece in The Times by Carol Midgley). Since then there’s been an even bigger change in online headlines. Once upon a time, if a man had bitten a dog, the headline would have been, “Man bites dog” – leave out ...

Content is a big deal these days. If you work in media or marketing, you’ll be hearing a lot about content. Even if you don’t, you may be thinking about it as a way to help promote your business. My job title recently changed from a series of variations on “editor”, to “head of content”. ...

I enjoyed this very sensible piece by Steven Pinker for the Guardian, on grammar rules that it’s OK to break – sometimes. Pinker says of grammar rules: Supposedly a writer has to choose between two radically different approaches to these rules. Prescriptivists prescribe how language ought to be used. They uphold standards of excellence and a respect ...

As if there weren’t already enough reasons to love Wikipedia, I think their fundraising email sent out in the run up to Christmas is brilliant. Clear, simple, informal, and not afraid to say bluntly what Wikipedia is and isn’t. “Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here.” “We don’t think having your email address ...

So Tesco burgers have horsemeat in them. Not great news, but the supermarket has apologised and assured customers that: “We will work harder than ever with all our suppliers to make sure this never happens again.” Harder than ever, you say? This is an example of a tic I see cropping up increasingly in corporatespeak: ...

In a hilarious mixup, I recently received the ‘before’ and ‘after’ versions of a heavily Photoshopped corporate photograph. I’m not going to share the pictures with you as that would be unfair to the person concerned – you’ll have to take my word for it that the difference was pretty stunning. It was also quite ...

What’s an executive blow-dry? I genuinely don’t know. But they’re available at the Canary Wharf shopping centre for £20. Does it mean a blow-dry for people who make decisions? A blow-dry for people who earn more than a certain amount? A blow-dry for the president?

In our world of instant communication and supposed consumer empowerment, it continues to baffle me how some companies get away with being impossible to contact. The worst offenders tend to be companies like Facebook and Google who provide online services for free – making it a bit difficult to complain anyway. But it also extends ...

Following the extraordinary developments in the phone-hacking scandal this week, I’ve had the feeling of reading one of those choose-your-own-adventure books that I used to love as a kid, where every page presents you with a choice, and every choice sends the story in a weird new direction. After David Cameron’s press conference on Friday ...

Gosh, this News of the World phone hacking scandal is a bit of a shocker, isn’t it? Still, it could be worse. I mean, it’s just pampered celebrities, isn’t it? It’s not like they hacked the voicemails of anyone important. It’s not as if they targeted victims of terrorism or murder. I mean, it’s not ...